In his latest post Rob Allengives a "first look" at a new feature in the Zend Server (v7) product from Zend - Z-Ray. The z-Ray feature gives you a complete "under the covers" look at what your code is doing including resource use, database connections and processing time.

I've been running the beta for all my development work for a while now and the main reason is the new Z-Ray feature. Z-Ray is a bar that is injected into the bottom of your page showing lots of useful information.

His post shares some of the results he found with his development version of Joind.in and screenshots of the results. He shows the levels of detail available at each level, all directly in the browser. It even includes functionality to track all variables being created or used in the current execution.

If you're a speaker (or even if you're not and just want to play with the API) and have information on Joind.in, Lorna Mitchell has a quick way you can pull you information from the site into an easy to use format.

I've recently been thinking that I should also do a better job of linking through to the various talks I'm giving/have given - and at around the same time I was contacted by the good folk at mojoLive about integrating against joind.in. To cut a long story short, the joind.in API now has the functionality for users to retrieve their list of talks!

Her example just uses a file_get_contents to pull the data from the remote URL in a JSON format. You don't need to be logged in to get to the talk information, though, so you won't need to bother with OAuth for this one. A snippet to loop through the results is also included.

Following the principle of "release early, release often", I put live a very early version of the v2 API for joind.in today (so that I can use it in another project!). I haven't updated the documentation yet but in case anyone was thinking of consuming data from joind.in, this at least gives you an idea of the direction of the project so I thought I'd share.

The new service is RESTful and has a few working features already including fetching event and talk details, pagination and multiple output formats. You can find samples of the output here and here. If you're interested in seeing the source so far, check out the github account for Joind.in (and maybe even clone a copy).

His code connects to the Joind.in API and fetches the event's talk information and the comments for each. His "calculatePearson" function then takes in two users and the set of ratings to figure out how similar their preferences are. There's also a bit of code that approaches it from a different angle - providing recommendations for users based on their own comments.

The PHPBenelux group has officially announced this month's BugHuntDay they'll be having near the end of November on Saturday the 27th in the offices of WEBclusive.

As has become tradition after 2008 (Zend Framework) and 2009 (symfony), we again organize a PHPBenelux BugHuntDay in November this year. We even decided to make the BugHuntDay a bit bigger. On Saturday November 27th, we will be focusing not on one but on two projects! We will focus on Zend Framework for the framework-heads, and on the Joind.in codebase for the community-heads.

Developers wishing to work on the code base for either project are welcome, whether you're familiar with the frameworks involved or not (Joind.in uses CodeIgniter). If you're planning on attending, sign up and mark yourself as attending on this Joind.in event.

If you're going to be attending this year's php|tek (in Chicago) Keith Casey has a suggestion for something else you don't want to miss while you're there - the Unconference happening "after hours" every day of the main conference (save the tutorial day).

Well, we're just about two weeks from php|tek 2009. While many of the presenters are touching up their slides, brushing up their talks, and thinking of the pizza that's yet to come... I have a different question for you: What are you doing? As of today, I'm officially collecting ideas for the php|tek unconference. As I get ideas (I already have quite a few), I'll post them on [...] Joind.in under the php|tek Unconference event. Then all you have to do is register on the site, vote for the session, and feel free to leave feedback.

He's looking for a few good talks or even suggestions for talks you might like to hear about. If you have an idea, let Keith know either via email (at keith [at] blueparabola.com) or on Twitter. He'll add them to the Joind.in page for the event for comment, suggestions and votes on which you, the adoring public, might want to hear.